Q: What is the aim of the “Strengthening Democracy” initiative?
A: Well-functioning democracies require accountable representatives, accurate and freely available information, equal citizen voice and participation, free and fair elections, and abiding respect for democratic institutions. It is troubling for the political science community to see increasing evidence of democratic backsliding in Europe, Latin America, and even here within the United States. While we cannot single-handedly stop the erosion of democratic norms and practices, we are able to focus our energy on understanding and explaining the basis causes of the issue and developing interventions to keep up the healthy functioning of democracies.
MIT's political science has historically produced necessary research on many points of the democratic process, including voting behavior, election administration, information and misinformation, public opinion and political responsiveness, and lobbying. The goals of the Strengthening Democracy Initiative are to bring these diverse research programs under one roof, to advertise synergies between our various research projects and between political science and other disciplines, and to discover MIT because the nation's leading center for rigorous, evidence-based analyzes of democratic resilience.
Q: What is the research focus of the initiative?
A: The initiative is predicated on three research pillars. One pillar is election science and administration. A democracy cannot function without well-conducted elections and, just as importantly, public trust in these elections. Even inside the United States, let alone in other countries, there are enormous differences within the electoral process: whether and the way people register to vote, whether or not they vote in person or by mail, how polling places are operated, how votes are counted and validated, etc Results are communicated to residents.
Already the nation's leading center for the gathering and evaluation of election-related data and the dissemination of best election practices, the MIT Election Data and Science Lab is well positioned to expand the scope and scale of its activities.
The second pillar is public opinion, an enormous area of research that features experimental studies of public reactions to misinformation and analyzes of presidency response to mass attitudes. Our faculty use survey and experimental methods to look at a spread of substantive areas, including tax and health policy, state and native politics, and techniques for combating political rumors within the United States and abroad. The foundation for this pillar is formed by faculty research programs and long-standing collaborations similar to the Political Experiments Research Lab, an annual collective survey wherein students and school can participate, in addition to frequent conferences and seminars.
The third pillar is political participation, which incorporates the consequences of the criminal justice system and other negative interactions with the state on voting, the formation of residents' assemblies, and the lobbying behavior of corporations in congressional laws. Some of this research relies on machine learning and AI to gather and analyze massive amounts of knowledge, giving researchers insight into phenomena that were previously difficult to research. A related research area on political advice combines computer science, AI and social sciences to research the dynamics of political discourse in online forums and the possible interventions that may mitigate political polarization and promote consensus.
The initiative's flexible design will allow recent pillars to be added over time, including international and domestic security, strengthening democracies in numerous regions of the world, and addressing recent challenges to democratic processes that we cannot yet see.
Q: Why is MIT well suited to host this recent initiative?
A: Many people view MIT as a STEM-focused, highly technical place. And indeed it’s, but there’s tremendous collaboration between and inside MIT's departments – for instance, between political science and the Schwarzman College of Computing and the Sloan School of Management, and between the social sciences and the science and engineering departments. The Strengthening Democracy Initiative will profit from these collaborations and construct recent bridges between political science and other fields. It can also be necessary to notice that it is a non-partisan research effort. MIT's political science department is thought for its rigorous, data-driven approaches to the study of politics, and its position inside the MIT ecosystem will help us maintain our popularity as an “honest broker” and disseminate groundbreaking evidence-based research and interventions Helping democracies change into more resilient.
Q: Will the brand new initiative have an academic mission?
A: Naturally! The department has a protracted history of recruiting quite a few undergraduate researchers through MIT's Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program. The initiative can be structured to supply these students with the chance to review various facets of the democratic process and to be sure that the college has a pool of talented students who can assist them of their projects. My hope is to supply students with the resources and opportunities to check their very own theories by designing and implementing surveys within the United States and abroad and using insights and tools from computer science, applied statistics, and other disciplines to tell policy to analyze phenomena. As the initiative grows, I expect more opportunities for college students to work with state and native officials on improvements to election administration and solve recent puzzles related to healthy democracies.
Postdoctoral researchers may even play a distinguished role by driving research along the initiative's pillars, supervising undergraduate researchers and taking over among the administrative points of the work.
Q: That appears like a long-term endeavor. Do you expect this initiative to last?
A: Yes. We have already laid the groundwork to create a number one center for research into healthy democracies (and find out how to make them healthier). But we want to construct capability, including resources for a pool of researchers who can move from one project to a different, enabling synergies between projects and inspiring recent projects. A sustained initiative may even provide faculty and students with the infrastructure to reply quickly to current events and recent research—for instance, by launching a nationwide survey experiment, collecting recent data on a side of the electoral process, or testing the consequences of a brand new AI Political perception technology. As I prefer to tell our supporters, there are recent challenges to healthy democracies that we didn’t envision ten years ago, and undoubtedly there can be others in ten years that we didn’t imagine. We have to be prepared to conduct an intensive evaluation of all of the challenges that lie ahead. And MIT Political Science is one of the best place on the earth to implement this ambitious agenda over the long run.
